Lenny Kravitz Discusses His Drug Vices

Born May 26, 1964, Lenny Kravitz falls under the sign of Gemini—the Twins. Both a rock legend and a fashion icon, Kravitz has built his reputation oscillating between these two passions. Today, he jets between a regal mansion in Paris, a home which fulfills the star’s “opulent fantasy,” and an organic farm in the Bahamas with “very few clothes, very few things.” A return to the womb of nature. One day he’ll make an appearance at the foot of the Eiffel tower for Saint Laurent’s SS18 show. The next, he’ll be washing clothes on a rock in Eleuthera.

So “natural” might be the most concise way to describe the artist’s lifestyle and how he approaches his craft. Another might be: “consistent.”

Kravitz has remained relevant thanks not to a shape-shifting capacity to change with the times, but because of his refusal to abandon the retro-chic aesthetic that launched his career and which sustains him today.

“Are you gonna go my way?” Kravitz asked in 1993. It seems the world answered yes.

But to look at Lenny Kravitz today, it’s hard to imagine that his first album, Let Love Rule, dropped nearly three decades ago. And it’s exactly the rock star’s ageless longevity that’s the focus of a revealing interview with Mr Porter, in which Kravitz discuss his virtues, his vices and his secrets to staying young.

Lenny Kravitz Comes Clean About His Drug Vices

Despite pushing 57 years, Lenny Kravitz shows no signs of stopping.

He releases an album every three years, with two in the works, one of which will be the score of a film he’s directing. On the other side of the camera, Kravitz has starred in the Oscar-nominated film Precious (2009) and played the stylist—how fitting—in the first two Hunger Games movies. And this list of accolades hasn’t even touched Kravitz’s fashion and design businesses.

In his personal life, Kravitz admits to being drawn to extremes.

“My life has always been high-low,” he said. “I’m attracted to being in the hood or being in an opulent place. The middle does nothing for me.”

Kravitz is a self-described “champagne hippy,” although lately, the hippy seems to be winning out. Kravitz admits to being drawn inexorably to simplicity. In recent years, he’s sold his penthouse in New York, his waterfront home in Miami and his farm in Brazil.

It’s a turn back to basics, in an effort to return to the raw energy of the natural. How has Kravitz stayed so young-looking and in shape?

“By doing nothing to my body or my face,” he explained. “I just wash it with water. I eat primarily raw, foods that are alive, vibrating, emit energy.”

He’d rather eat off the land, growing produce on his organic farm in the Bahamas, than have champagne and caviar with Mick Jagger.

So it’s no surprise that Lenny Kravitz’s drug vices follow suit. The musician “never got into heroin or coke or pills.”

Instead, weed was his vice when he was younger, along with “a natural psychedelic here or there.”

For Kravitz, the best high comes from his discipline and his old-school Bahamian values of “follow through.”

“I’ve never felt so vibrant as I do right now,” Kravitz said.

Lenny Kravitz Refocusing On His Music

It’s a good thing, too, if Kravitz hopes to perform at the same level for the next two decades.

“If you take care of yourself, age doesn’t matter” the rock star opined. He looks to the 74-year-old Mick Jagger for inspiration. “Mick can outperform a 20-year-old,” Kravitz quipped.

Weed vices aside, it was the tragic death of Prince that jolted Kravitz into a renewed attention toward self-care and revived devotion to his musical legacy. Prince lived clean. He didn’t even allow alcohol into his Paisley Park home. And that’s exactly why Prince’s 2016 death from an opioid overdose came as such as shock.

“It really rocked me. He passed and it’s horrible, but he really did his thing to the fullest,” Kravtiz said of Prince. “And I felt like if I had passed, my story is incomplete. I mean music-wise, I’m not even close. It really made me refocus.”